VII. System to which the regular clergy is subject.
System to which the regular clergy is subject.—Restoration
and application of Gallican doctrines.—Gallicanism and
submission of the new ecclesiastical staff.—Measures taken
to insure the obedience of the existing clergy and that of
the clergy in the future.—Seminaries.—Small number of
these allowed.—Conditions granted to them.—Proceedings
against suspicious teachers and undisciplined pupils.
The secular clergy remains, better protected, it seems, and by a less precarious statute, for this statute is an international and diplomatic act, a solemn and bilateral treaty which binds the French government, not only to itself but to another government, to an independent sovereign and the recognized head of the whole Catholic Church.—Consequently, it is of prime importance to rebuild and raise higher the barriers which, in ancient France, separated the secular clergy from the Pope, the customs and regulations which constituted the Gallican Church a province apart in the Church universal, the ecclesiastic franchises and servitudes which restricted the Pope's jurisdiction in order that the jurisdiction of the king might be extended. All these servitudes to the advantage of the lay sovereign, and all these franchises to the prejudice of the ecclesiastic sovereign, are maintained and increased by the new statute. By virtue of the Concordat and by consent of the Pope, the First Consul acquires the same rights and privileges in relation to the Holy See as the old government,"[5172] that is to say the same exclusive right to nominate future French cardinals and to have as many as before in the sacred college, the same right to exclude in the sacred conclave, the same faculty of being the unique dispenser in France of high ecclesiastical places and the prerogative of appointing all the bishops and archbishops on French territory. And better still, by virtue of the Organic Articles and in spite of the Pope's remonstrances, he interposes, as with the former kings, his authority, his Council of State and his tribunals between the Holy See and the faithful. "No bull, brief, rescript, decree... of the court of Rome, even when bearing only on individuals, shall be received, published, printed or otherwise executed without permission of the government. No person, bearing the title of apostolic nuncio, legate, vicar or commissioner, ... shall, without the same authorization, exercise on the French soil or elsewhere any function in relation to the interests of the Gallican Church.... All cases of complaint by ecclesiastical superiors and other persons shall be brought before the Council of State."[5173] Every minister of a cult[5174] who shall have carried on a correspondence with a foreign court on religious matters or questions without having previously informed the Minister of Worship and obtained his sanction shall, for this act alone, be subject to a penalty of from one hundred to five hundred francs and imprisonment during a term of from one month to two years. Every communication from high to low and from low to high between the French Church and its Roman head, cut off at will, intervention by a veto or by approval of all acts of pontifical authority, to be the legal and recognized head of the national clergy,[5175] to become for this clergy an assistant, collateral, and lay Pope—such was the pretension of the old government, and such, in effect, is the sense, the juridical bearing, of the Gallican maxims.[5176] Napoleon pro-claims them anew, while the edict of 1682, by which Louis XIV. applied them with precision, rigor and minuteness, "is declared the general law of the empire."[5177]
There are no opponents to this doctrine, or this use of it, in France. Napoleon counts on not encountering any, and especially among his prelates. Gallican before 1789, the whole clergy were more or less so through education and tradition, through interest and through pride; now, the survivors of this clergy are those who provide the new ecclesiastical staff, and, of the two distinct groups from which it is recruited, neither is predisposed by its antecedents to become ultramontane. Some among these, who have emigrated, partisans of the ancient régime, find no difficulty in thus returning to old habits and doctrines, the authoritative protectorate of the State over the Church, the interference of the Emperor substituted for that of the King, and Napoleon, in this as in other respects, the legitimate, or legitimated, successor of the Bourbons. The others, who have sworn to the civil constitution of the clergy, the schismatics, the impenitent and, in spite of the Pope, reintegrated by the First Consul in the Church,[5178] are ill-disposed towards the Pope, their principal adversary, and well-disposed towards the First Consul, their unique patron. Hence, "the heads[5179] of the Catholic clergy, that is to say, the bishops and grand-vicars,... are attached to the government;" they are "enlightened" people, and can be made to listen to reason.
"But we have three or four thousand curés or vicars, the progeny of ignorance and dangerous through their fanaticism and their passions."
If these and their superiors show any undisciplined tendencies, the curb must be tightly drawn. Fournier, a priest, having reflected on the government from his pulpit in Saint-Roch, is arrested by the police, put in Bicêtre as mad,[5180] and the First Consul replies to the Paris clergy who claim his release "in a well-drawn-up petition,":
"I wanted[5181] to prove to you, when I put my cap on the wrong side out, that priests must obey the civil power."
Now and then, a rude stroke of this sort sets an example and keeps the intractable on the right path who would otherwise be tempted to leave it. At Bayonne, concerning a clerical epistle in which an ill-sounding phrase occurs, "the grand-vicar who drew it up is sent to Pignerol for ten years, and I think that the bishop is exiled."[5182]
At Séez, when constitutional priests are in disfavor, the bishop is compelled to resign on the instant, while Abbé Langlois, his principal counsellor, taken by the gendarmes, led to Paris from police station to police station, is shut up in La Force, in secret confinement, with straw for a bed, during fourteen days, then imprisoned in Vincennes for nine months, so that, finally, seized with paralysis, he is transferred to an insane retreat, where he remains a prisoner up to the end of the reign.
Let us provide for the future as well as for the present, and, beyond the present clergy, let us train the future clergy. The seminaries will answer this purpose: "Public ones must be organized[5183] so that there may be no clandestine seminaries, such as formerly existed in the departments of Calvados, Morbihan and many others;... the formation of young priests must not be left to ignorance and fanaticism."—"Catholic schools need the surveillance of the government."—There is to be one of these in each metropolitan district, and "this special school must be in the hands of the authorities."—"The directors and teachers shall be appointed by the First Consul"; men will be placed there who are "cultivated, devoted to the government and friendly to toleration; they will not confine themselves to teaching theology, but will add to this a sort of philosophy and correct worldliness."—A future curé, a priest who controls laymen and belongs to his century, must not be a monk belonging to the other world, but a man of this world, able to adapt himself to it, do his duty in it with propriety and discretion, accept the legal establishment of which he is a part, not damn his Protestant neighbors, Jews or freethinkers too openly, be a useful member of temporal society and a loyal subject of the civil power; let him be a Catholic and pious, but within just limits; he shall not be an ultramontanist or a bigot.—Precautions are taken to this effect. No seminarist may become subdeacon without the consent of the government, and the list of ordinations each year, sent to him at Paris by the bishop, is returned, cut down to the strictly necessary.[5184] From the very beginning, and in express terms,[5185] Napoleon has reserved all curacies and vicarages for "ecclesiastics pensioned by virtue of the laws of the Constituent Assembly." Not only, through this confusion between pension and salary, does he lighten a pecuniary burden, but he greatly prefers old priests to young ones; many of them have been constitutionnels, and all are imbued with Gallicanism; it is he who has brought them back from exile or saved them from oppression, and they are grateful for it; having suffered long and patiently, they are weary, they must have grown wiser, and they will be manageable. Moreover, he has precise information about each one; their past conduct is a guarantee of their future conduct; he never chooses one of them with his eyes shut. On the contrary, the candidates for ordination are strangers, the government which accepts them knows nothing about them except that, at the age when the fever of growth or of the imagination takes a fixed form, they have been subject for five years to a theological education and to a cloistral life. The chances are that, with them, the feverishness of youth will end in the heat of conviction and in the prejudices of inexperience; in this event, the government which exempts them from the conscription to admit them in the Church exchanges a good military recruit for a bad ecclesiastical recruit; in place of a servant it creates an opponent. Hence, during the fifteen years of his reign, Napoleon authorizes only six thousand new ordinations,[5186] in all four hundred per annum, one hundred for each diocese or six or seven per annum. Meanwhile, by his university decrees, he lets lay daylight into clerical enclosures[5187] and shuts the door of all ecclesiastical dignities to suspicious priests.[5188] For more security, in every diocese in which "the principles of the bishop" do not give him full satisfaction, he prohibits all ordination, nomination, promotion, or favor whatever. "I have stricken off[5189] all demands relating to the bishoprics of Saint-Brieuc, Bordeaux, Ghent, Tournay, Troyes and the Maritime Alps.... My intention is that you do not, for these dioceses, propose to me any exemption of service for conscripts, no nominations for scholarships, for curacies, or for canonries. You will send in a report on the dioceses which it would be well to strike with this ban." Towards the end, the Gallicism of Bossuet no longer suffices for him; he allowed it to be taught at Saint-Sulpice, and M. Emery, director of this institution, was the priest in France whom he esteemed the most and most willingly consulted; but a pupil's imprudent letter had been just intercepted, and, accordingly, the spirit of that association is a bad one. An order of expulsion of the director is issued and the installation in his place of a new one "day after to-morrow," as well as new administrators of whom none shall be Sulpician.[5190] "Take measures to have this congregation dissolved. I will have no Sulpicians in the seminary of Paris.[5191] Let me know the seminaries that are served by Sulpicians in order that they too may be sent away from these seminaries."[5192]—And let the seminarists who have been badly taught by their masters take heed not to practice in their own behalf the false doctrines which the State proscribes; especially, let them never undertake, as they do in Belgium, to disobey the civil power in deference to the Pope and their bishop. At Tournay,[5193] all those over eighteen years of age are sent to Magdebourg; at Ghent, the very young or those not fit for military service are put in Saint-Pelagie; the rest, two hundred and thirty-six in number, including forty deacons or sub-deacons, incorporated in an artillery brigade, set out for Wesel, a country of marshes and fevers, where fifty of them soon die of epidemics and contagion.—There is ever the same terminal procedure; to Abbé d'Astros, suspected of having received and kept a letter of the Pope, Napoleon, with threats, gave him this ecclesiastical watchword:
"I have heard that the liberties of the Gallican Church are being taught: but for all that, I wear the sword, so watch out!"
So behind all his institutions one discovers the military sanction, the arbitrary punishment, physical constraint, the sword ready to strike; involuntarily, the eyes anticipates the flash of the blade, and the flesh is feels in advance the rigid incision of the steel.